Friday

Remember those nights you spent memorizing irregular French verbs into the wee hours of the morning wondering why no one ever thought of a simpler language? Actually, someone did.

Remember those nights you spent memorizing irregular French verbs into the wee hours of the morning wondering why no one ever thought of a simpler language?

Actually, someone did.

In 1887, a Polish doctor, Ludwig L. Zamenhof, created the Esperanto language based on simple grammatical rules with very few exceptions. Zamenhof hoped because the language was easier to pick up than most others and because it was not aligned with any specific country, it could be used as a politically neutral second language to foster simpler communications between foreign nations.

Today, the language is still alive, and by some estimates is spoken by about 2 million people worldwide.

In Acton, members of the local chapter of the Esperanto Society of New England meets about once a week at Acton New London Style Pizza on Route 111 to bone up on their Esperanto and chat with other speakers. Both newcomers and fluent speakers are welcome. At its peak, the group had about 50 members, but it now only has a few active members.

David Wolff, a 52-year-old software engineer, started the local Acton chapter about 10 years ago.

Wolff, his 7-year-old Black Lab Tucker at his feet, spoke to The Beacon recently about the value of the language, its simple format and the local Esperanto speaking community.

Q: Can you start by telling me a little bit about the Esperanto society and the local chapter?

A: Esperanto has groups at local, national and international levels. The local group the Esperanto Society of New England is not very active at the moment. Like any group you need at least a couple of active people to make it work. Three of our most active people have moved out of the area in the past few years. I was one of the most active people but I also ended up as president of the national organization [the Esperanto League for North America] for six years, so I’m kind of burnt out for any more activity support for a while. We do have meetings in Cambridge, Northampton or Amherst, and we have a weekly meeting here in Acton at New London Style Pizza on Route 111. We get — depending on who’s busy — two, three, four people. Some people come, some people go. It’s a chance to get together to practice, to learn a little, and just to chat.

Q: And what happens at the meetings?

A: At the Acton meetings that depends on who’s there. If there are new people we have lessons. We have some short stories that are easy and amusing. We might review some of the more complicated parts of grammar when we trip over them. We do a lot of just chatting and we’ll discuss politics or sports or life … whatever happens to come up, mostly in Esperanto.

Q: How hard a language is it to pick up?

A: Ah, that’s one of the key features of Esperanto. It’s a lot easier to learn. You can probably learn it four times faster than other languages. Esperanto has a number of features that make it a lot easier to learn. First is that the grammar is very simple. Instead of having a lot of declensions for nouns, Esperanto has a very stripped down set. Instead of having a lot of verb endings, Esperanto has a very simple and completely regular set. So, for example, once you learn the present tense verb ending, it works for every verb, it works for every noun that you turn into a verb, for every adjective that you turn into a verb. It’s always the same, so you don’t waste a lot of time worrying about exceptions. Another thing is that it has a bunch of prefixes and suffixes that you can stick on words to create new words. So you might not know the exact right word for something, but you could probably put something together. And in many cases, these put together words are what people use all the time. So for example, the word for “hospital” is “not very healthy person place.”

Q: How did you first get interested in Esperanto?

A: I first got involved in Esperanto after college because I wanted to learn a foreign language. I’d never learned a language well enough to actually use it and I thought it was something I wanted to do from an intellectual viewpoint, something to expand my horizons a little bit. I was thinking about this for a while and I remembered I’d heard about Esperanto and it was supposed to be a lot easier. Being a very lazy person, I said, “This is a good idea.” And that’s how I got started. I kept on going because it is easy, it is fun. I was actually able to start learning and using this language. Also, it seemed like a way to make the world a better place. If you can break down the language barriers between people, instead of everyone having to learn my language, or me having to learn 30 different languages for 30 different countries, Esperanto was intended as a second language that could be shared by everybody, and it was clear to me that it definitely could do that so I became interested in helping the organization grow by spreading the word.

Q: What are some of the advantages of Esperanto over other languages?

A: The advantages are first that it’s much easier to learn. It’s politically neutral, so it doesn’t belong to any single country or any single group so we find very little prejudice against it or people who say “It belongs to this country so I don’t want to learn it.” It’s a politically neutral language, or as close as you can get. Another advantage is that you can talk to about 2 million other people, so it’s not just a few people in Acton, or a few hundred people in the United States, it’s a couple million people across the world who speak it, who have experience with it, so there’s a lot of what I call social capital invested in this movement that you can reach into and use. I think one of the other advantages is that it’s fun. It’s a fun language to learn and a fun language to use. You don’t get bogged down in memorizing exceptions. You learn some grammar and some vocabulary and you can start using it. And, yes it will take time to learn. It’s not like other good causes where you can just write a check. It’s an intellectual challenge, but it’s not one that will take you years and years to succeed at.

Christian Schiavone of The Beacon (Acton, Mass.) can be reached at 978-371-5743 or at cschiavo@cnc.com.

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